As we mentioned in a previous article, Red Hat advocate Greg DeKoenigsberg claimed that due to the much larger amount of code it's contributed, Red Hat is a better open source citizen than Canonical, adding, "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization." A Computerworld blog retorts that that's no insult; and that marketing Linux could be just as important to the cause as contributing code. Updated

I find Mandriva just as polished and new-user-y but with better hardware support. Canonical just doesn't include the same amount of required hardware support do to the focus on open source with closed source firmware and such being opt-in.

When it does come up in conversation, the usual reason for someone reverting back to Windows is "it won't support my wireless" or similar; something that could easily be fixed by including the closed source hardware support by default. I think *buntu gets far more attention than it deserves for it's place in the meritocracy. It's more popularity than substance. There are more user friendly distributions which have been at it longer but without the marketing push to prop them up. In my own new user days, it was Mandriva's GUI draketools that finally got me over the hump long before Canonical was a twinkle in Mr Shuttleworth's eyes.

I also take issue with default setting choices and claiming a production distribution based on testing/unstable parent branches.

At the same time, I'm very happy that Canonical is showing that marketing is important. They also contribute a crapload of patches back to Debian because they do focus on the testing and unstable branches. Those are fantastic benefits which they deserve credit for.

True though, I wouldn't claim Debian is a new user distro; especially with the way I build it out from a minimal install and custom package selection.